1. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to communications and in particular to systems and methods for monitoring traffic in a communications system.
2. Description of Related Art
This section describes related art, and accordingly, the statements in this section are not admissions of prior art.
Data networks, such as cloud networks, data center networks, etc., are able to support multiple customers and applications. Such data networks include interconnected network devices, such as bridges, switches or routers, for transporting various types of traffic, such as voice, data and video traffic, through the data network.
Virtualization enables a host platform or server to be partitioned into virtual machines. A virtual machine may have its own allocated operating system, applications and network interfaces on the host platform. A data network may provide network services to transport traffic between virtual machines and to other networks or destinations. Virtual machines are typically connected to the data network by edge nodes. Selection of the edge nodes for connecting virtual machines to the data network may be initially based on considerations of quality of service and network performance metrics. However, in addition, measurement of actual network performance of the network paths between edge nodes interconnecting virtual machines to the data network is needed to help determine compliance with service level agreements.